For those of you who do not know, Bulwer-Lytton wrote The Last Days
of Pompeii, which opens with the famous line "It was a dark and
stormy night." Hence the contest. These are the 10 winners of this
year's Bulwer-Lytton contest (run by the English Dept of San Jose
State University), wherein one writes only the first line of a bad
novel.
10) "As a scientist, Throckmorton knew that if he were ever to
break wind in the echo chamber he would never hear the end of it."
9) "Just beyond the Narrows the river widens."
8) "With a curvaceous figure that Venus would have envied, a
tanned, unblemished oval face framed with lustrous thick brown
hair, deep azure-blue eyes fringed with long black lashes, perfect
teeth that vied for competition, and a small straight nose, Marilee
had a beauty that defied description."
7) "Andre, a simple peasant, had only one thing on his mind as he
crept along the East wall: 'Andre creep... Andre creep... Andre
creep.'"
6) "Stanislaus Smedley, a man always on the cutting edge of
narcissism, was about to give his body and soul to a back alley
sex-change surgeon to become the woman he loved."
5) "Although Sarah had an abnormal fear of mice, it did not keep
her from eeking out a living at a local pet store."
4) "Stanley looked quite bored and somewhat detached, but then
penguins often do."
3) "Like an over-ripe beefsteak tomato rimmed with cottage cheese,
the corpulent remains of Santa Claus lay dead on the hotel floor."
2) "Mike Hardware was the kind of private eye who didn't know the
meaning of the word 'fear'; a man who could laugh in the face of
danger and spit in the eye of death -- in short, a moron with
suicidal tendencies."
AND THE WINNER IS...
1) "The sun oozed over the horizon, shoved aside darkness, crept
along the greensward, and, with sickly fingers, pushed through the
castle window, revealing the pillaged princess, hand at throat,
crown asunder, gaping in frenzied horror at the sated, sodden
amphibian lying beside her, disbelieving the magnitude of the
frog's deception, screaming madly, 'You lied!'"
